Bart beats blues

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There's plenty of life left in our favourite yellow
family from Springfield, writes David Carr.

If, for the sake of art or science, a person were to sit
down and watch every episode of The Simpsons ever made, it
would take him or her more than a week of no-sleep, back-to-back
viewing in 350 half-hour increments.

In that marathon the viewer would learn that life on a street
called Evergreen Terrace never really changes, that Bart, Lisa and
Maggie, along with their creator, Matt Groening, will not grow up,
and that the Simpsons, once viewed as the shock troops of cultural
mortification, are a shining exemplar of family stability in the
come-and-go world of television.

And even though some suggest that it ran out of gas some time
ago, the show remains in high gear, with 20 writers working on next
year's season, searching for yet another joke that has yet to be
told on The Simpsons.

An animated sitcom that seemed to lose some of its bite as it
grew long in the tooth has been back in the news, with a recent
episode on gay marriage and, later this season, a satirical - some
would say sacrilegious - episode about the Simpsons' dalliance with
Catholicism and another about the apocalypse.

Groening, despite his own hints in previous interviews that the
show might be running its course, has found a second wind.

"I think the show has almost reached its halfway point, which
means another 17 years," he says - and this of a show that is
already the longest running now on television.

James L. Brooks, a veteran television producer who helped
develop the series, said the episodes being worked on for next year
will be "vintage", in part because of the influx of new writing
blood.

And just in case that does not satisfy the apparently bottomless
appetite for all things Simpson, Groening, Brooks and others are
working in an office on the 20th Century Fox lot on the
long-rumoured Simpsons movie.

With more than $US1 billion in green kicked up by the yellow
people of Springfield, there is little reason that Fox would not be
in a good mood.

Although recently running 68th out of all network shows, The
Simpsons still attracts almost 10 million viewers in the US,
many of them in the younger demographic groups that advertisers
crave.

They were apparently happy enough to give a party last week
memorialising the 350th show, a number no other currently running
show has achieved.

Groening, as the series creator, the actors and the legions of
guest stars made a yellow-carpet arrival for the crew party. And
then the whole Simpsons family plopped down in front of a big
screen to watch "Don't Fear the Roofer", the 350th episode, with
guest appearances by Ray Romano and physicist Stephen Hawking.

The episode was broadcast in the US on Sunday and will screen
here in a few weeks.

The party was a rare break in a year-round schedule. Ten days
ago, Nancy Cartwright, the voice of Bart, was at the microphone
recording additional tracks for an episode that will be broadcast
later this season.

Pain, the leitmotif of life as a Simpson, is getting another
workout. "Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow," she said, in the
helium-inflected voice of of America's favourite brat as she
watched an animation of Bart being serially mauled by a rotating
mattress.

The painful fun of making The Simpsons has yet to wear
off. The Simpsons was conceived by Groening in 15 minutes
before a pitch meeting with Fox - in the rush he used the names of
his family for the characters.

What began as an animated sideshow to break up the live-action
sketches for Tracey Ullman's show became its own show in December
1989.

"I always thought the show would be a hit," Groening says. "At
the time Fox was brand new and willing to experiment. To this day I
don't think it could get on any other network."

Groening, 51, looks very much like the tidied up ex-hippie he is
- mod glasses, slight paunch. Brooks, one of the show's other
godfathers, says: "We always say to ourselves that we will know
when to call it a day, and there have been times when we have
seriously considered it. But I think we are all feeling great about
the show right now."

Getting new rubber on an old tyre is no small effort - the show
is always in danger of self-parody. Yet on the day we visited, the
table read, a rehearsal with actors present, seemed to go well.
Writers, actors and people from on and off the lot clamour for a
chair.

"My Fair Laddy" tells the story of Lisa's attempt to transform
Groundskeeper Willie, the brutish Scottish janitor at Springfield
Elementary, into a proper gentleman as her Pygmalionesque
experiment for the annual science fair.

The read had the feel and sound of an old-time radio drama,
though with more updated cultural references. Owing to his time in
mock stirrups with the Monty Python-inspired musical Spamalot in
New York, Hank Azaria was piped in by phone, as was Yeardley Smith,
but the rest of the cast was there.

The episode belongs principally to Dan Castellaneta, who plays
Homer, Groundskeeper Willie, Krusty the Clown and five other
characters in just this episode, and who shifts octaves,
inflections and accents in the time it would take most people to
clear their throat.

In the middle of the read, Castellaneta kicks into a version of
Wouldn't It Be Loverly from My Fair Lady, which
becomes Wouldn't It Be Adequate, coming from the Scottish
maintenance man.

"Matching socks for both my feet, dining on untainted meat, a
toilet what still has its seat, oh, wouldn't it be adequate," he
sings.

Groening, who sat in the middle chair making notes on the
script, emitted some of the loudest guffaws.